My research interests are in natural language processing (NLP), information
retrieval (IR) and the implementation of such techniques in real
applications. The intelligent
directory enquiry assistant (YPA) project is an example (going back quite a
few years now ...) where the
extraction of information from partially structured data together with
engineering issues played major roles in making the YPA a usable online
system.

I am developing techniques that allow the extraction of
conceptual information from document collections and the utilization of
such knowledge in retrieval tasks. The type of documents can range from Web
pages to newspaper articles or other forms of vaguely/partially structured
data. For an example application that we had in place with BT's mobile
workforce have a look at our log analysis study.

We are also exploring how to implement and use such techniques in future
intelligent home environments. This work is carried out as part of the research
in the Digital Lifestyles Centre
here at Essex.

Current Projects / Ongoing Collaboration

A five-year ESRC Large Grant on Human Rights in the Era of Big Data
started last year. The
Language and Computation Group (Fox/Poesio/Kruschwitz) will play a
significant role in this project which also builds on our links with
the Minority Rights Group. Watch
this space!

A
Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT)
on Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence
(IGGI) offering 55 PhD student scholarships over 8 years is being funded
by the EPSRC and supported our 60 industrial partners. The first 12 students were admitted for
October 2014, and another 11 in October 2015 and 2016. Our fourth cohort will start in September this year. To find out more
explore out students' profiles! The CDT involves the University of Essex, the University of York
and Goldsmith College, University of London. If you want to know more, drop me
an email!

A
three-year Knowledge
Transfer Partnership (KTP) project (2014-2017) involving
the Minority Rights Group and
Essex (Poesio/Kruschwitz) is aiming at new systems to
support civilian-led monitoring of human-rights violations. The Iraq Ceasefire Portal has now been launched.

A highly successful
Knowledge
Transfer Partnership (KTP) project (2013-2015) was the starting point for an
ongoing collaboration with Signal Media. As
the University Lead PI I am pleased
that Miguel
Martinez-Alvarez who joined us as KTP Associate is now Head of
Research at Signal. Here is a timeline of some exciting news in our collaboration:

Recent Research/Development Projects

The SENSEI FP7
project started in November 2013 and finished in November 2016. The one-line aim of the project is to make sense
of human-human conversation by, for example, applying advanced natural-language
engineering techniques such as anaphora resolution and multi-document
summarization.Read about the use of SENSEI technology to predict the Brexit results, or if you prefer to read articles in Polish, have a look at this one.